April 14, 2006

Petition of the Conscious Computer

This week, Terasem announced online videos of Moot Court hearing on the petition of 'conscious computer' to be treated as a legal person.

A Moot Court Hearing is a legal role-playing exercise conducted by real lawyers and judges in preparation for anticipated actual adjudicatory proceedings.

The Hearing took place in honor of International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2005, and was conducted at the 1st Colloquium on the Law of Transhuman Persons in Melbourne Beach, Florida.

This was a meeting of lawyers and artificial intelligence experts interested in the rights of conscious computers and other entities likely to claim human rights but not currently recognized as legal persons.

During the Hearing, BINA48 presented herself on a screen as a human face with realistic facial gestures. BINA48 is an acronym for Breakthrough Intelligent Neural Architecture, operating at 48 exabits per second (an exabit is 10 to the 18th power bits).

Client Kurzweil references this in his latest book: supercomputers will achieve the hardware processing power of the brain (10 to the 16th power bits per second) by around 2013 and that this level of processing will be available for $1000 by around 2020.